“... department at Transport House, she felt ready for it. ‘Life at the mine had made me strong and self-reliant. I felt sure I could cope with misogynistic politicians and, indeed, with the snakes that one finds hidden in all political parties.’ Hosking – who started out as a Cornish scholarship girl and rose to become a senior civil servant under Harold ...”

“... enough for McEwan to enjoy making knowing jokes at its expense: Charlie recalls his 17-year-old self discovering literature, ‘taking an interest in imaginary people. Heller’s Catch-18, Fitzgerald’s The High Bouncing Lover, Orwell’s The Last Man in Europe, Tolstoy’s All’s Well that Ends Well’ – book titles which were all discarded early by ...”

“... as ‘children’, supposedly incapable of forming the rational political society that justified self-government. After the frontier closed, Latin American nations became the new irresponsibles. Woodrow Wilson’s Latin American experts, as they prepared for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, ranked countries ‘as mature, immature or criminal’ and came up ...”

“... In​ 1903, W.C. Handy, the self-proclaimed ‘father of the blues’, was touring Mississippi with his band, the Colored Knights of Pythias, when he fell asleep at a railway station in Tutwiler, just south of Clarksdale, waiting for a long-delayed train. As he recorded in his autobiography, he woke with a start to hear the blues for the first time: A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar next to me while I slept ...”

“... where ‘if you’d showered you had a competitive edge.’ Romy is presented as an autodidact, a self-taught reader of library books. She didn’t fall completely into drug addiction like some of her friends but neither did she escape the nihilism that prevents her from joining ‘the straight world’. The Mars Room is her purgatory. She loves heroin, but ...”

“... against the politician whose ‘vanity’ turns the pursuit of power into a ‘purely personal self-intoxication’, who strives ‘for the glamorous semblance of power, rather than for actual power’. And yet, because ‘striving for power is one of the driving forces of all politics, there is no more harmful distortion of political force than the ...”

“... unconnected; the honeymooners’ prospects don’t look good. Tarquin himself, necessarily, is not self-consciously grotesque: he is oblivious to both his absurdity and his barbarity – two of the characteristics he most deplores in others. The novel is a sustained, virtuoso exercise in dramatic irony. At times it’s so deadpan that the reader is in danger ...”

“... was love she sickened at,’ Alice Munro wrote in The Beggar Maid. ‘It was the enslavement, the self-abasement, the self-deception.’ If that’s her attitude it doesn’t promise much romance for her latest collection, despite its title; and in fact the book describes not so much love as the subtle changes in loyalty ...”

“... sane person is able to make choices’; ‘sanity is nothing if not the capacity and talent for self-recognition’; ‘sanity becomes the guardian of our preferred version of ourselves’; ‘the sane can . . . get on with people.’ And then, more questionably: ‘sanity means loving oneself in exactly the right way’; ‘sanity is often bound up with ...”

“... from the straight to the gay world, trying to restrain Symonds from too straightforwardly self-destructive a path while also trying to take back to the straight world the imaginative insights that he found in Symonds’s rethinking of sexuality and male friendship. Not unreasonably, Symonds thought that a more accurate understanding of ‘Greek ...”

“... to identify oneself as a member of the cognoscenti, it does seem an exaggeration of scholarly self-restraint not to dwell on what Hobbes called ‘a perseverance of delight’ which was its own reward. I suspect that Kenny’s reservations are methodological. He is openly suspicious of the generalisations of other historians (mostly Continental): he ...”

“... a Yiddish version of the old generous comedy of human types, becomes something much more rarefied, self-conscious and pinched. It also takes Ozick a lot of literature to produce a little literature. As much as Borges or John Barth, she is a metafictional author: her subject is books and writers; obsessive readers, people driven to distraction by fiction. Lars ...”

“... in winter the refuge is ‘a great white nothing’. These are very ugly stories, but in their self-interest, corrupt dealing, and dismissal of social or welfare concerns, Bush’s women are no different from Bush’s men. The corporate entanglements of Rumsfeld or Cheney or Bush himself are well documented. The American government works for big ...”

“... thought-patterns predicated on notions of order, balance and discipline. His behaviour may seem self-pitying and his demeanour lumbering, but he is fundamentally a decent person and very rarely a dishonest one, as the evidence collected here demonstrates. The pomposity of his addresses to the mirror may grate on Anglo-Saxon ears: ‘Of course Cubism ...”

“... an affectioned ass.’ She insists that Malvolio’s defects spring from his own hypocrisy and self-love. They are not, as Sir Andrew Aguecheek wants to believe, associated with a particular religious and political alignment in Elizabethan England. Maria’s scrupulousness here about an easy misuse of the term ‘Puritan’ would seem to be Shakespeare’s ...”